The lithograph actually wasn't stolen thankfully (it's not in high demand but is really hard to find)! It was just put in a really weird place by the mailman.
Thieves did steal 3 used books though. One on the principal agent problem. A book on theatre. And a $2 used copy of 'Hackers'.
HN users, like most nocoiners are reasonably skeptical of Bitcoin. As they should be. Cryptocurrency is dangerous, and if you don't know what you're doing you can lose a lot of money fast. The upsides of cryptocurrency are very abstract and hard to grasp on an individual level (privacy, security, decentralization, competition, etc). While the downsides of cryptocurrency are obvious, immediate and material (scams, cyber-crime, electricity use, etc); the average joe has "heard enough" about bitcoin from the mainstream news scaring him away.
HN users are way more informed than the average joe. Most of them grasp the basic concepts behind cryptocurrencies. Most of them work in an industry where "blockchain" and "decentralization" are grifty buzzwords, so they are reasonably skeptical about any project that uses these words.
I have had a lot of success shilling monero on HN. You just have to pick and choose your battles. You can't win every argument, but you can briefly make a few good points.
Bitcoiners have largely abandoned the "digital cash" narrative (to their own detriment). If you want to convince people about bitcoin, don't tell them that it will overturn the global economy, don't tell them that it will completely revolutionize society, don't tell them that it's the greatest thing since gold, don't tell them to invest. Just tell them it does one thing and does it well: digital cash. Everything else comes second.
I pretty much agree with everything you said but one:
Bitcoiners have largely abandoned the "digital cash" narrative (to their own detriment).
I personally believe that leading with "digital cash" was us jumping the gun. Understandably so, since Bitcoin was initially designed to be digital cash and people tried to use it as such. The monetization of any asset seems to follow certain stages and most people, especially early Bitcoiners, weren't all that versed in Austrian economics.
The stages of monetization seems to go like this:
Collectible
Speculative Asset
Store of Value
Medium of Exchange
Unit of Account
We were saying Bitcoin was at step 4 when we were really at step 1.
i dunno... i feel like it's probably fine for a certain subset of the population. i used to feel like it was great, but then i noticed what i thought/think was astroturfing of dissenting opinions. and then i sorta grew out of the place.
now, it sucks for me to be there. the majority views are orthodox in the extreme... just feels gross now.
Your node has to be on to receive the payments and route for others (to earn some sats back).
If you prefer a wallet that doesn't have to be always on, have a look at Phoenix or Blixt. They will open a channel on their node, while you keep custody of your sats. It's a good compromise for nomads or people who don't have much of technical knowledge.